


shepherd

by despommes



Category: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: Character Study, Child Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Minor Character Death, Taking liberties with Greek mythology, but not really enough to tag, slight Thantaos/Zagreus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:54:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27050746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/despommes/pseuds/despommes
Summary: There is nothing beautiful about this prolonged winter. An overbearing houseguest, stayed long past its welcome. Spring was nowhere in sight and the snows only continued to pile up outside of empty homes doomed only to grow emptier. Thanatos is too sensible to complain about his workload, but he has never seen anything quite like it. It is not his place to lament his role in the grander scheme of things, and yet none of this feels natural. None of this feels right.Demeter wages a war of her own, it seems, and the mortals caught in the storm are but fodder for her grief. In the meantime, Ares will water her barren fields with blood. Lord Zeus will continue to keep his secrets. Thanatos will be here, quite literally reaping the consequences they never give any thought. The gods of Olympus will have their fun and he and his siblings will continue to clean up the mess. It is simply the way of things. There is no point in dwelling on it at length. That is the duty of his sisters, and he does not envy them for it.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 53





	shepherd

**Author's Note:**

> Dipping my toes into Hades fic with a small character study for Thanatos.

Even under the rich curtain of night, the surface is overwhelmingly bright.

The snow soaks in every drop of moonlight until the glare of it could be mistaken for the grey and frigid sun. Mother Nyx’s shroud is familiar, even up here, draped as it is over this frozen land. It is a comfort he has known since he was a tiny thing, trailing after her with a fistful of her elegant skirts and his brother in tow. He prefers the night to the day, but on this night, as has much been the case in recent days, not even the stars overheard aid in making this realm any more bearable.

The streets of the village are barren. Snow yet blankets the stones underneath. There are few left in the hamlet willing to clear it away, fewer still who would walk here either way. He has been to this place often of late. He has been to so many villages just like this one, for many of the same reasons.

Thanatos breathes in the frozen air. He can feel the chill of it in his lungs, though it does not bite at him. If anything it welcomes him as though to say,  _ I have been waiting for you. _ At one time he had known the colder months to be beautiful. A natural end to a vital cycle, where whatever was fated to die would die and then be reborn in the spring to do it all over again. Life and death, in perfect balance. As it should be.

There is nothing beautiful about this prolonged winter. An overbearing houseguest, stayed long past its welcome. Spring was nowhere in sight and the snows only continued to pile up outside of empty homes doomed only to grow emptier. Thanatos is too sensible to complain about his workload, but he has never seen anything quite like it. It is not his place to lament his role in the grander scheme of things, and yet none of this feels  _ natural.  _ None of this feels right.

Demeter wages a war of her own, it seems, and the mortals caught in the storm are but fodder for her grief. In the meantime, Ares will water her barren fields with blood. Lord Zeus will continue to keep his secrets. Thanatos will be here, quite literally reaping the consequences they never give any thought. The gods of Olympus will have their fun and he and his siblings will continue to clean up the mess. It is simply the way of things. There is no point in dwelling on it at length. That is the duty of his sisters, and he does not envy them for it.

The house, like so many others around it, is all but silent. Darkened windows give it the impression of having been abandoned, though he knows it is not. The door is made of flimsy wood that creaks as it opens, yielding to him as all things living eventually do. Though the inside is nearly as cold as it is outside, he closes the door to keep the worst of the wind at bay. He is always only a visitor in these places, here and gone in the blink of a mortal eye. His mother taught him manners and he heeds them well.

She is knelt close to the hearth, his reason for having come here. In her trembling hands she holds a flint and tinder, trying again and again to light a fire that will never ignite. Hestia’s warmth has long since left this place. Thanatos allows his feet to meet the worn floorboards, the long handle of his scythe tapping ominously. It echoes through the house. The sound is quiet, but not quiet enough to go unnoticed.

She turns her head towards him then, her dark hair matted and filthy as it flings about her face. The confusion in her expression is one he knows very well. It can be hard to tell whether they recognize him for who he is, when they are still small. While the scythe may frighten them, the gold around his throat may dazzle them, the silhouette of his hood may distract them, many look at him and simply see a stranger.

Children rarely learn to fear him in the same way adults do.

The little girl blinks at him, the tinder and flint falling to clatter near her feet. She tries to stand and stumbles, toes caught up in secondhand clothes far too big for her. He sees her throat bob in a stunned swallow as she tries to find her voice.

“Did I forget to lock the door?”

The question almost surprises him. She asks as though it were a chore she had carelessly forgotten. He shakes his head slowly, but the hesitant sheen still lingers in her wide eyes. “No,” he tells her, softly, and he does not mention that there is no lock in existence intricate enough to waylay death.

“Oh. Good.” 

She turns her back on him then, her stiff fingers scrabbling for the abandoned flintstone. As soon as she gets a grip on it she drops it again. This time it skids over the floor. He simply waits, watching her struggle to look for it in the dark. He hears her utter a hushed curse and then clamp a shocked hand over her mouth, looking guiltily at him as though she expected him to scold her. He does not.

“What do you want?”

Thanatos tilts his head. He pulls back the hood obscuring his face. “I need you to come with me.”

“Are you taking me away?”

“Yes.”

Realization, or something close to it, falls over her then. Whether she knows who he is, he cannot tell, but the resolution that sets her chin indicates she has at least some idea of what is happening. “I know who you are.” It’s not clear who it is she is talking to. “What’s your name?”

“My name is Thanatos.”

“I knew that.” Perhaps she did. Perhaps she is only saying so. It hardly matters. She wipes a hand over her dirty cheek. “I’m Korinna.”

_ I knew that. _

He knows her name the same as he knew those of her family. Her father, dead to battle. Her older brothers, dead to famine. Her younger sister, dead to disease. Her mother, dead to the cold. He came for them the same way he comes for her now, the same as he comes for every living soul that has left the Earth. He remembers them all, too. He will remember Korinna and her frozen little hands long after this is done.

“Um. Just a minute.” Korinna looks frantically around the dreary house, as though there is something she is forgetting. The dead, of course, cannot take anything with them, and he nearly tells her so but falls silent at the last moment. Her lungs gasp for breath the longer she speaks. “I have to… to p-put out the fire. Mother said to put out the fire before we leave. It’s not safe to leave it… burning.”

“Korinna.”

Her blue lips come to a close. She stares at the empty hearth like she can still see the flames that used to dance there. Thanatos thinks she may be close to tears, a familiar enough sight to him in moments like these. To her credit, however, she manages to fight them back.

“It is time to go.”

He purposefully keeps his voice mild. Gentle. A timid acceptance replaces the foggy fear in her pallid face. Many children cry when he takes them, and he always abides their tears with the humility they deserve. Korinna wants very badly to weep; he can see it in her eyes. The obstinate wobble in her bottom lip persists, but she does not cry. Likely she understands very well there is no one left to answer. None but him.

“Okay.” She nods to him. She takes a long, weary breath, summons more courage than he has found in most kings and soldiers whenever he comes calling, and she stands to follow him. “Okay. I’m ready.”

I’m ready. That is something he is more accustomed to hearing from the mouths of old, wizened men with a legacy to leave behind, or resigned and baleful women convinced there is nothing of value left to them in this world. Not from a cold, lonely child left in the dark. Thanatos thinks of her neighbors nearby, huddled around their blazing hearths with their families and their tables set for supper. He wonders if there had been room for just one more among any of them. How many of them had known about Korinna in her freezing, empty house.

It is not his place to judge the dead for their sins. He simply comes to lead them on this next leg of their journey.

“You’re not here for anyone else, are you?”

Thanatos is inevitable, and he is everywhere. Even now in this very moment, he is in so many places at once. He is ushering warriors from carrion-strewn battlefields to where his brother the ferryman waits, ready to collect his fare. He is standing at the foot of a young mother’s birthing bed, bearing the brunt of her wails for him to leave her be with the child for whom she lost her life. He is preparing to drag a fading miser from his ill-gotten hoard of wealth at the same time as he gathers the subjects left to starve as their lord had feasted. All of them destined for the Underworld. For his scythe.

This, though. This particular sliver of time and space marked along the threads of fate, this is all for her. “No one else,” he assures Korinna. “Only for you now.”

She still shivers as they cross the threshold out into the snow. That will fade, he knows, as they come closer to the Styx and farther from the world of the living. “Is it terribly cold?” she asks then. “… Wherever it is we are going?”

Thanatos is used to questions. It is not one he has never heard before, especially not now with this permanent and ghastly winter. “No,” he says to her. “You will not be cold there.”

“Will there be food to eat?”

“There is food, if you want it. Though you will never go hungry again.”

Her dark eyes go impossibly round then. She stares at him in wonder, as though he has made all of these things possible himself. No more blistering cold. No more murderous hunger. No more empty silence. Not for her, not anymore. Of course, he is only an escort in this design. He sees souls off to their afterlife, and then he moves on to the next.

He sees the hesitation as they reach the edge of the humble village, her bare feet shuffling in the newly fallen snow until they come to a stop. He allows her a few moments to reflect. Always with the little ones he exercises a patience only death is capable of, does what he can to make this easier on tiny hearts for which so much is already so difficult.

It is why he stretches out his arm, offering her the palm that does not carry the scythe.

“Would you like to take my hand?”

It can be interesting, to see how they respond. Some will adamantly refuse, insisting they are too grown up, that they don’t need to hold anyone’s hand. Some of them, usually the very, very young ones, will latch on to him as soon as the opportunity presents itself. Others, like Korinna, take a while to decide. Her gaze darts from her feet to his empty hand, as though weighing her options.

In the end she grabs for him with her own frostbitten little fingers, grip tight as a vice. He clasps her hand in his. Already the chill begins to fade from her skin.

They walk for a long time. Thanatos leads her through the woods beyond the town, up into the mountains beyond even that. The night lingers around them. He hopes for Korinna’s sake that some of his own mother’s element is a form of comfort to her. Time stretches around them as they go, the starlight glittering against the snow like a spell. The night will follow them until they reach the end of this journey, until he sees her off and into the next.

He feels it when she stumbles, the sudden tug against his hand as her feet slip underneath her. The breath that leaves her had steadily begun to steam less and less in the wintry air. Soon it will cease to cloud the air, much like his own does not. He stops each time she trips. He waits for her to stand.

“Sorry.”

A single, whispered word nearly lost to the icy stillness of this strange, halted night. “I will carry you, if you need it.”

She is fading. He sees it in the silvery cast of the goddess Artemis’ full moon. “Okay,” Korinna acquiesces, nodding her head as her shoulders slump. In a wordless gesture she reaches up and out to him, arms lifted in the universal language of small children aching to be held.

The scythe finds its place at his back and Thanatos stoops to lift her. He tucks her in at his hip, as his own mother had done with him and with his brother, long, long,  _ long _ ago. The weight of her head against his shoulder is hardly anything at all. Her bones feel bird-brittle in his arms, like she could be spun of naught but frosted glass and gossamer down. She clings to the front of his chiton with a white-knuckle grip. Her eyelashes feel like wisps of a butterfly’s wings against his neck.

They hear the river before they find it. The slow and steady waters of the Styx murmur to the two of them from where it lies nestled in amongst the rocks and trees of the mountain. It is as innately known to Thanatos as the unlikely beat of his own pulse. In a way it invokes any and all things precious to him. His family lies at the end of this river. His home. His lord. His queen. His prince.

His heart.

The water this close to the surface is not the familiar red that breaches the gloom of the realm below. No, here beneath the vast expanse of his mother’s sky the waters are simple and clear and fathomless. No ice floats along the gentle rapids here, no stray pebbles or wayward debris. Nothing but brisk, clean water.

Thanatos takes a step towards the river bank. Korinna’s arms tighten around his neck.

“I can’t swim.” She whispers it close to his ear, tight and pitiful with fear. “I never learned how. I’ll sink. I’ll freeze.”

“It’s all right,” he tells her. She stares deep into his eyes, desperate to believe him. He finds a strange sort of trust as he gazes back, born of either instinct or lack of any other real option, he can’t be sure. “You will not drown in these waters.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

She does not struggle as he cradles her tiny body to his chest. As he lowers her down, Korinna slowly releases her hold on his robes. She peers expectantly into his face, the placid waters swirling around her while she sinks.

“Close your eyes,” he says, soothing, calm, not unlike the River Styx itself. “When you next open them, you shall see all your family. They’re waiting for you.”

“Will I see you again, Thanatos?”

He blinks. It is not the first time he’s been asked this. He never quite knows how to answer. It’s not out of the realm of possibility, though he hardly ever recognizes so many of the souls he brings home beneath the Earth. The multitudes of faceless shades haunting the halls of the House of Hades, the depths of Tartarus, the plains of Asphodel, the paradise of Elysium. There is no way to know.

“Perhaps you will.”

“Good.”

With that, he draws his hand over her face. He draws her eyelids closed. Waits for the labored rise and fall of her chest to still, her limbs to slacken, her soldiering heart to beat its last. And he lets her go. Watches diligently as the river claims her, steers her to drift down into the currents below.

When she is gone, little Korinna with her dark eyes and her trembling hands, Thanatos drags himself from the river, takes again his scythe in hand, and hurtles himself towards the next name on his list.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!!! Please leave me a comment and let me know what you think.
> 
> Follow me on [tumblr](http://isaidyoulookshitty.tumblr.com) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/despommess).


End file.
